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Old 26-08-2005, 06:49 AM
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iceman (Mike)
Sir Post a Lot!

iceman is offline
 
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Gosford, NSW, Australia
Posts: 36,799
A few other points to address, just to aleviate any concerns:

1. Most ever users online: 348.

This high number is because a new searchbot of some sort became active one day and trawlled through the site with its little spiders to add the site to its search engine. It's normal for searchbots to do this, and this time there was just more than what you normally see. I'm going to change the number back to what it was previously (41).

2. Guest users doing admin duties (when looking at who's online)

Again, this is due to searchbots. Searchbots just follow links looking for content on pages to add to their search engine index. The searchbots followed a link that is normally reserved for admins/moderators, and therefore they get an error page (same as you would if you tried it). There's nothing malicious happening.

3. All threads being marked as "read" suddenly.

There is a cookie timeout of 15 minutes, so if you open up the forums, maybe read a few threads and go and have a cup of coffee or something, if after 15 minutes you come back and refresh the index page, your "new post" indicators will be gone because the cookie has timed out. That's normal behaviour for this version of vBulletin. In the new version of vBulletin being released in the near future, they will be introducing "real" unread post functionality, so the posts will stay marked as "unread" until you have actually read them (or marked them all as read).

4. Mysterious users signing up

This isn't happening, but to address a concern raised to me about whether it possibly could happen. Those searchbots I talked about, there's also spybots that try to automatically register with some forums so they can do things like email/PM other users and generally spam stuff. This can't happen on the IceInSpace forums due to the Image Verification step that you have to complete as part of the registration. You'll see the same thing when you sign up for yahoo, msn etc. It's to fool those automated registration bots so that they can't actually "read" the graphic and enter the required validation text. So rest assured, all members are real and valid members.


I hope that puts your mind at ease, for anyone worrying about these things.

If you have any other questions, concerns or problems, please feel free to email or PM me and i'll be glad to give you an explanation.
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